I’m not going to pretend like I follow or even care about the state of the video game industry, beyond if there’s anyone I know within it that relies on it to stay afloat for the health of their wellbeing. But a while back, I heard that Terry Bogard from the Fatal Fury series was going to be made available as a playable character – in Street Fighter 6; and my eyebrow scrunched and I tilted my head like a dog when hearing something confusing.
Why.. is a Fatal Fury character being released in Street Fighter?
Clearly, somewhere along the timelines of SNK, my guess is that business had to go so tits up at some point to where they began to have to sell off or lease off intellectual property, and stronger entities like Capcom are more than willing to invest in established IPs if they’re made available. And so, despite being one of the Street Fighter franchise’s most prominent competitors, Fatal Fury has basically relegated themselves to being the uncomfortable victim company in a metaphorical merger.
So Terry Bogard, the de facto main character and protagonist of the Fatal Fury franchise, is now novelty DLC character in the Street Fighter franchise. Supposedly, Mai Shiranui is on the way as well if she’s not already out, and that seems appropriate too, considering she was the pin-up for basically all of SNK, and was their answer to Chun Li as far as having a strong female character with sex appeal.
But it all seems kind of weird and awkward to see the fate that seems to have befallen SNK to where their strongest characters are basically being loaned to the Street Fighter franchise, despite the fact that at one point, they held their own, and existed as a viable and competitive alternate to them.
It reminds me of when I saw Sonic the Hedgehog as a playable character in one of the Super Smash Bros. games. The main character of the franchise that was spearheading Sega’s determination to overthrow Nintendo’s position in the video game industry, now just a playable character in one of their massive library of titles. And I’ve read plenty about the history of Sega and their proud and defiant history of trying to compete and defeat Nintendo, which adds to the feeling of sadness and defeat that they’ve gotten to the point where their IPs were absorbed by Nintendo, and at the mercy of their discretion at what would see the light of day in the future.
That’s kind of what it feels like to me, seeing Terry Bogard, Mai Shiranui and any future Fatal Fury or other SNK characters showing up in Street Fighter or any future Capcom title for that matter. There’s an air of defeat and quite literal ownage, if it is true that Capcom has purchased the rights to their competitors IPs.
But let’s not chalk this up as a complete win for Capcom here; no, getting ahold of other existing characters just means Capcom can remain on cruise control as far as creating new and interesting characters goes. The company hasn’t really had an original idea in seemingly over a decade now, leaning consistently on remakes, remasters, re-releases in all of their signature franchises, like Street Fighter and Resident Evil. Packaging all their old arcade beat-em-ups into these overpriced collections and hitting them with a high pass filter and claiming they’re remastered.
Instead of attempting to create and innovate, Capcom would rather get throw money and purchase other properties, even of their competitors, and just merge them into their existing machines and hope that people continue to spend their cash on their shit. And that’s how we end up with Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui in Street Fighter. It’ll be fun to see whom they trot out next, surely guys like Andy Bogard and Joe Higashi need to make their way in, but beyond them it’s anyone’s guess at who and how they’ll manage to shoehorn any other Fatal Fury names into a Street Fighter roster without bloating it up to Marvel vs. Capcom 2 proportions.
